Sunday, September 28, 1980

Sunday September 28th

Sunday as usual except for a lot of bitterness between Mum and Dad. I got up at 9.30 and after reading the “Sunday Times” and just sitting around I went upstairs to do my football leagues.

When I came down around 2 o’clock the sun was shining from a clear sky. It was very quiet downstairs so at first I thought everyone had gone out, but to my surprise I found Mum and Nanna P. sitting in the front room looking at old photographs. Dad was out at N.B’s. This is what all the trouble was about.

Dad got the car back yesterday after a month, only because Horner had fitted the car with some temporary springs, and apparently he had promised to take Mum out for a run earlier on in the week if he got the car back. A few angry words were exchanged at dinnertime over Robert’s house between Mum and Dad, and after ringing Nanna B., Dad went out in the car, leaving Mum and Nanna Peale at home. I could tell Mum was fuming, especially since it was sunny, and to crown it all, when Dad got back it transpired that he’d taken Nanna B out for a run instead! I can see why Mum was upset.

The rest of the evening was conducted in stormy silence, and I stayed out of the way in my bedroom playing ‘Santana.’ At about eight-thirty, Mum and Dad took Nanna P. back, and I reckon that there was a flaming row on the way back because when Mum came in and I said something about her being in a bad mood she nearly bit my head off!

After I came to bed (I watched Alan Jones become World Champion in the Canadian Motor-Racing Grand Prix), I heard Mum blasting on at Dad viciously – “I loathe you tonight” . . . – “You give her a run yet all she does is sit on her arse all week . . .” etc.. – and eventually she stormed into the spare bedroom to sleep on her own. That’s the first time that’s happened ever, I think. I can understand Mum, but I also feel sorry for Dad. All he was was a bit thoughtless, and Mum’s going on so is just a bit selfish, I think. She doesn’t really like Nanna B.

I sound like an over-the-garden-fence gossiper tonight, and the above reads like an episode from “Coronation Street.”

I suppose I should’ve done some reading for school over the weekend, yet somehow I can never seem to buckle down to it.

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ABOUT MERE PSEUD . . .

"It's about time you started thinking about the black dog on your back."

Mere Pseud emerges from the stain of a particular place at a particular time—England in the early 1980s, dreaming its way through the era of the Miner’s Strike, CND, Rock Against Racism, of Thatcher, the Falkland’s War and mass unemployment, an era that marks a turning point for British society, the advent of what we might call neoliberalism.

This four year long autofiction project mixes diary entries, cultural observation, teen confessionals, an enduring love for UK postpunk band The Fall, image-meditations on memory, and spoken word fragments; it’s a reckoning with the passages of time and the spectral intermingling of futures and pasts, a slantways slide through places, spaces, and states of mind.

This is the moveable backdrop; part social history, part prolonged personal pratfall, the spectral trace of a world that's already curiously antique.

"The journal has such familiar episodes . . . being a certain age at a certain time in history, the political atmosphere, cultural touchstones, living situations . . . desires to both escape and belong ending in nihilistic abyss of fuckitall."

PRINCIPAL DRAMATIS PERSONAE, SUMMER 1983

The Mere Pseud . . . The unreliable eighteen-year old modernist narrator of this fable. Now a student at Watermouth University. Perhaps he'll run into Howard Kirk?Barry, Stu, Pete, Penny, Gareth, Shelley, Lindsey. University friends.

Rowan Morrison. Dark-eyed changeling who lived a few doors down from the Mere Pseud his first year at Wollstonecraft. A little older and a little weirder than all the rest. Her dark sun sends a chill through the second floor corridors of Wollstonecraft.

Helen Vaughan . . . (1864-1919). Enigmatic Yorkshire novelist, author of The Harp of the Sky (1920), and inspiration for British horror writer Arthur Machen's character of the same name in his story "The Great God Pan." Occasional object of the Mere Pseud's obsessive thoughts about death, time, and the passing of all things.

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